The immediate reaction we hear from most GLS Studios visitors is “What
a great place to work!”. And they’re right. GLS Studios is a fun place
to be, and we’ve worked hard to foster a skunkworks style culture. By
design, our space is a place where educators are encouraged to ask what
is possible for the future of learning rather than get too bogged down in
the system that is.

Creating and maintaining such a culture isn’t easy and we’re working on
it all the time. Our collective experiences in academics, industry, rock
bands, even the military have taught us a number of things about creating
and fostering a creative culture that gets things done.

1. Default to open as much as possible. Good games require that everyone
share a sense of project priorities in terms of learning goals, aesthetic
vision, and technical and use requirements. We strive to be as transparent
as is useful and try to facilitate communication at every turn. It’s better
that we regularly share knowledge peer-to-peer rather than a top down
communication of vision.

Little habits that help are:
- Creating open areas for meetings to be public. Any meeting that doesn’t
need to be private should be public. We encourage people to drop in on
meetings. Spontaneous sharing can happen before and after.

- Leadership should strive, when possible to work in open areas
(particularly while doing interruptible tasks like email).

- Take care of your own problems, and avoid getting in others. A
simple one that works in life is that problems should be communicated
directly to people or up the food chain, but repeating someone’s problems
“so and so is frustrated with you” is verboten.

In our next post, we’ll discuss why cliques can be good and why it’s
good to set up a music room in your work place.

Who We Are
GLS Studios is a fully-functioning game studio with over 15 veteran game
developers from AAA, indie, and academic backgrounds. Spun out of the
GLS Center directed by Dr. Kurt Squire, GLS Studios combines industry
quality-game development talent with the resources of a world-renown
university. We leverage our unique position on UW-Madison campus
to forge strong relationships with UW researchers, draw curriculum design
talent from UW’s School of Education, and leverage the GLS community for
access to subject-matter experts, parents, teachers, K-12 schools, and
gamers of all ages.